


Carve a Path

by Bohemienne



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Confessions of love, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, M/M, Post-Timeskip, let's unfuck power imbalances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-25 00:10:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20367415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bohemienne/pseuds/Bohemienne
Summary: A life sacrificed is a debt paid. Then what remains?





	Carve a Path

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to save this for Dimidue Week, I swear, but I'm at a writing retreat and drinking and I have too many feels

It is a long ride back to Garreg Mach.

Dimitri should feel elated. Flushed with victory and all the attendant bloodrush—another batch of traitors slain, Count Gloucester’s son and the von Aegir heir felled for their insolence. He should feel sorrow for his former classmates refusing to yield at the end of his lance. And most of all he should mourn Rodrigue Fraldarius, dying in his stead.

In his stead. No—not dying for him. For the _idea_ of him, for the promise of a true king of Faerghus. Like countless others had done, believing somehow that this broken, shattered boy was worth the unending pile of corpses.

Just like Dedue had believed—

And perhaps that’s the cruelest twist of all. Dedue’s alive, he’s whole, he—he came back, still wishing to carry on the fight—

Goddess, but why? Why did he throw his life away to begin with, why did he think Dimitri worth the cost? He is not the boy who faced down his own kingdom’s troops in Duscur so long ago. That boy died at the end of his own gift—a dagger placed freely in the hand of his enemy. A foolish, ignorant boy. No one worth dying for.

But if Dedue—if his true north, his steadying hand, can somehow survive amidst this hell—

Dedue glances toward him, scarred brow furrowed. As if even now, after years apart, he can still sense the slightest shift in Dimitri’s mood. It’s enough to shame Dimitri into bowing his head. Anything but meeting that seaglass gaze—even when all he wants to do is stare and stare.

But still he feels it, burning at his side. Burning with a thousand questions he can’t answer—crimes he can’t account for. Failures that will forever shackle him to his past. Answers he can never forgive.

He never knew he could be haunted by the ghosts of those who lived.

* * *

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

Dimitri starts to close the door to his rooms after delivering this statement, but Dedue curls his fingers around it, holding it open. With a groan, Dimitri releases it and storms back into his room. Flings himself on the rumpled bed. There was never any use trying to convince Dedue to stay away.

“If I hadn’t come,” Dedue says, following him into the cramped room, “they’d likely be scraping you off of the ramparts by now.”

That pulls a bitter laugh out of Dimitri. “Ah, look, you found a sense of humor. Do I really fight so incompetently?”

“No. Never incompetent.” Dedue gently shuts the door and folds his arms across his chest. With his armor removed, he’s dressed in a wool-lined deerskin jacket and leather breeches, a teal woven Duscuri shawl draped around his shoulders. Dimitri watches him from his one eye, taking him in, the full breadth of him, far too substantial to be a ghost. But if he was no ghost, than who had been haunting his restless sleep? Who’d been whispering in his ear night after night, reading his failures out like a litany?

“But I understand that you’ve come to show . . . little regard for your own life,” Dedue clarifies.

Dimitri flinches at that. His life was worth whatever obstacle it could put before the emperor and the path she was trying to carve. Sometimes a corpse was just a good.

But something unusual is tugging at Dedue’s features. Dimitri can’t recall the last time he’s ever seen Dedue look this way. Not commanding, wry, in control—he looks . . .

Angry?

“Does my sacrifice mean so little to you, prince?” Dedue asks. “I give my life for yours, only for you to try your damnedest to throw it away?”

Dimitri rears back, as staggered as if he’d been slapped. “But I—”

Dedue’s fist clenches and unfolds at his sides. Even at the height of fury—something Dimitri has never seen—Dedue is completely in control, calm and deliberate. Dedue would never speak this way to him if it wasn’t a thought he’d whetted over and over against that clever mind of his. “I meant to die in your place so you could continue your work. Save Faerghus. Its people. Cast out the invaders and reclaim what was rightfully yours. I meant for you to live so you could uphold a promise you made me years ago.”

And then, finally, on that last, Dedue’s voice shatters.

“Reparations for Duscur,” Dimitri says softly. “For every horror my people visited upon yours over the past nine years.”

Dedue nods, looking up at the ceiling—the tilt of his head almost enough to conceal the water brimming along his lower lashes. “Yes. That promise.”

“Goddess.”

Dimitri is standing, and then he’s sat hard on the mildew mattress of his old Officers’ Academy bed—there is no transition. Just like he sees no line between himself living and dead. But Dedue is absolutely right. In his rage and grief these past years—in his mourning for Dedue—he’s done nothing but betray Dedue’s memory. Again and again.

Maybe Dedue is a ghost after all, here only to remind him of yet another way he’s failed—and then evaporating to join the chorus of the dead in Dimitri’s mind.

“I promised you my life once,” Dedue says. That warble still in his voice. Dimitri wants nothing more than to smooth it down with his fingertips, unruffle the solid, stoic man who’s been his bedrock for so long. “I gave it. My—my debt is paid.”

Oh.

Dimitri’s mouth is hanging open, his tongue going dry. So that’s what this is, then. This is not a reunion.

It is farewell.

For so many years, he’d managed to forget that Dedue was bound to him, not by love, but by oath. An oath made as much for Dimitri as for the people of Duscur. It had been too easy to forget—when someone hangs on your every word, tends to your every need, defends your every interest—it was too easy to forget the power you held over them. The reason _why_. And for all Dimitri wanted to think himself above such power games, he, too, had forgotten.

He had fallen in love with someone who could never love him back, because love was not something he was free to give. Love was far too steep a price.

And then he’d squandered the most precious gift he’d ever been given. He’d made it as worthless as he himself felt.

“Y-you’re right.” Dimitri rubs at his right cheek; he’s usually shed his eyepatch by now, stripped away his armor and furs, crawled into the coffin he called a bed to await his nightly ghosts. “Your debt is paid. You do not serve me.” A sob tears out of him—another thing that won’t obey his will. “I will fulfill my promise to Duscur, as long as I still have a title someday soon to fulfill it with.”

Dedue nods, shoulders twitching restlessly. “Thank you. Your Highness.”

The title carries the weight of farewell.

No. Dimitri’s hand curls at his own throat, as if to choke him before his emotions do it for him. He’s not ready to say goodbye. Not so soon. Not when—

“If I no longer serve you,” Dedue says, visibly relaxing, “then I can speak to you however I like.”

Not farewell then—not just yet. Dimitri flattens the hand against his sternum to quell his panic down. “So you may.”

Dedue breathes in slowly, then back out. Repeats the process a few times. Dimitri wonders if he’s seeing the man beneath the armor for the first time in his life.

And then Dedue drops to his knees.

“Dimitri,” Dedue says.

Dimitri’s blood races.

“Dima.”

Dimitri can no longer breathe.

“I’ve been in love with you since we first breathed the same air. Sometimes it was obsession, fixation—devotion.” Dedue swallows. “You’ve been my sun and the road before me. You’ve been the comforting blanket of night. I gave my life because I swore it to you—but my heart, that was a gift.”

The room is swirling around Dimitri, his skin on fire with words he can’t form. With _want_. With that which he’s wanted as long as he knew what wanting was—

“If you need a fighter for your cause, I will fight. If you need a lover to warm you, I’ll burn. I no longer have a life to give you—only one to share.”

Dedue squeezes his eyes shut, lower lip trembling, as if he can’t go on.

“If that is . . . inconvenient to you, then I needn’t stay.” He shoves himself from the floor. “There is plenty else to do with my life.”

Dimitri can say nothing. What can he say to excuse the years of imbalance between them? What can he say to make right the years he loved Dedue too—but that to act on it would have itself been the greatest betrayal of that love?

Dedue’s jaw works as he waits a moment longer. Then, eyes closed, he reaches for the door.

“Lord Molinaro.”

Dimitri is on one knee now, head bowed in supplication. The blue rug, now ground with mud and years of dust, fills his vision, because to look up at Dedue is to break.

“That’s not—how did you—”

“That was your title, was it not? You were a lord, once. When there was a city for you to lord over.”

“That isn’t—” Dedue stops. Collects himself. “My lands are no more.”

“A people are more than just a land,” Dimitri continues. “They are a heart beating together. I didn’t understand, before, but having lost my own land—I know it now. And so I beseech you as their lord.”

At last the tear spills down Dedue’s cheek.

“I have loved you since I first heard you speak. I have loved your passion, your quiet, your strength. I love when you speak and when you don’t. I love every quiet moment—every frenzied thought—”

Dedue’s tears spill now, kissing Dimitri’s stringy, filthy hair. Washing it clean.

“You are a lord, and I am only a starved wolf, circling what once was his. But if you could find it in your heart—if that boundless heart of yours has room—”

“It does.” Dedue reaches down and hoists him up by his armpits. “It always does.”

He kisses Dimitri with exactly the tenderness that has haunted Dimitri’s thoughts all these years, lips soft but determined, mouth warm and comforting, grip firm and welcome. He kisses him as an equal. As two free men without a home. Because they don’t need a home when they have each other—when they have _this_, this bond that has wrenched each of them from their respective graves and put the daggers of devotion into their hands.

He kisses him because tomorrow does not, cannot matter. Whatever becomes of Faerghus, of this war—they have their hearts.

When they stop for breath, their foreheads rest together, their mouths gasp for the same air, shared again. “I love you,” Dimitri says again, because he can never say it enough.

“I love you, too.” Dedue exhales a disbelieving laugh. “Whatever path we must carve together—let’s carve it.”

Dimitri already knows the name carved on his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> if you're playing Blue Lions you have to scream at me @Bohemienne6, it's the law


End file.
